


The Fallacy of Up

by shamusandstone (theleaveswant)



Category: Firefly
Genre: Folk Music, Gen, Illnesses, Murder, Revenge, Theology
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-01-14
Updated: 2009-01-14
Packaged: 2017-10-20 16:19:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/214651
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theleaveswant/pseuds/shamusandstone
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mal’s going to kill somebody tonight. Post-movie.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Fallacy of Up

**Author's Note:**

> Written in 2006 for ficalbum claim, Neko Case's _The Tigers Have Spoken_ , first posted to lj in 2009. This is for the traditional song "Wayfaring Stranger". Antagonist is named for a character in Robert W. Chambers' _The King in Yellow_.

Of course Mal knows that “up” doesn’t really exist. He understands, as must any person who spends as much time vessel-side as he does, that “up” is a perceptual construction, an artifact of inner ears and natural or synthetic gravity. He knows that if he tips his head back he is not really looking up, only away from the centre of the planet on which he stands, and that if he repeated this action from any other point on the surface of this or any other planet, or the deck of any ship, he would be turning his face towards an entirely new direction. Even so, this is the gesture he unconsciously performs whenever he searches for heaven. He finds himself doing it more and more frequently lately, but whether this is because he is beginning to believe again or because Book is no longer there to catch him, he could not tell.

Mal stares out away from Dirt and into Black, and his eyes flicker over an unfamiliar canopy of twinkling lights. He remembers learning from the hands on his mother’s ranch, his diffuse and ever-changing first family, how to recognize patterns in the stars (Angel’s Hammock, the Drowned Lovers, Mother Armadillo) and determine from them his position and the season of the year. He remembers too seeing maps of the sky of Earth-That-Was, the dipper/bears, hunters and winged horses that kept company thousands of years of mariners, philosophers and other night-fond folks. He wonders what stories the people of this orbiting ball of dust find there depicted. He wonders if the man he’s come to kill contemplates the firmament regularly, or at all. If the brain through which he means to pass a bullet ever fires its synapses in facilitation of a game of celestial connect-the-dots.

Mal tries to name the souls he’s loosed from the coils of mortality, but his list begins with a jumble of the most memorable, the first and most recent, and he is alarmed at how quickly he loses track, how soon he starts counting people twice and how many he cannot call to mind. This disquiets Mal less by whatever it may indicate about the condition of his mental faculties and more by what it means for his identity.

A good man, Mal was long ago conditioned to believe, shouldn’t oughtta do nobody harm, not if he can avoid it or at least not without a damned good reason. While Mal feels somewhat confident in claiming justification for his entirely avoidable and rather too-regular harming acts (a confidence born out of, if not truth, at least sincere desire), it also seems to him to follow implicitly that a good man shouldn’t forget the harmful things he’s done. If he can’t keep tally of the lives he’s ended, what chance of inventorying those whose physical or material well-being he has compromised through the course of his life and pursuit of his livelihood? Never mind the harm he’s permitted to occur by inaction or the wounds he’s inflicted by words alone (the barbs he spits constantly in a vain attempt to fool himself into not feeling the flechettes she fires into him with every glance). Mal suspects, not for the first time, that he is not a good man.

Then again neither was the man whose blood would next stain his hands, that was unquestionable. A liar, swindler and cheat, naturally, but that was hardly unusual. Being responsible for extinguishing or endangering numerous lives did not put him in scarce company either, but his incomprehensible nonchalance, Mal wanted desperately to believe, did. Hildred Castaigne kept no count, made no effort to remember or even discover the damage he had done. While Mal’s moral ledger might be a touch on the messy side, Castaigne’s was blank not from innocence but from criminal negligence. Mal wanted to believe that shooting Castaigne would be the right thing to do even if himself and his crew, his kin, the ones he did his very damnedest to see no harm befall, had not been among Castaigne’s latest victims, but it was no use pretending he’d be doing it otherwise.

Castaigne was an ambitious dealer in supplies edible, medical and sundry, and while his prices were good he had ways (they learned subsequent to engaging in financial transaction with him) of tweaking and double-dealing every cheap purchase into a pocket-stuffing profit. In Serenity’s case, they had become the unknowing victims of an undocumented warehouse accident and an ill-considered use of storage space.

Castaigne had been responsible for the distribution of a consignment of essentially untested vaccine (not entirely ready for human use, it turned out), which suffered a mysterious containment failure while sitting next to a stock of fresh meat and produce. When Mal chose Castaigne’s facilities for a resupply, he’d managed to pawn off on them nearly the entire contaminated stock without a word of warning, and if that weren’t wicked enough he’d turned around and reported the vaccine stolen, offering the pharmacorp who owned it (their pristine reputation bought at a high price) an 03-K64 Firefly as culprit.

It took them near a fortnight to discover the abuse, by which point the entire crew save Zoe and River were (or ought to have been) bedridden with fever, wracking cough and mottled rash, symptoms of the trendiest new epidemic (an aggressive cousin of the chicken pox known as Io Strain), with a very angry biomed consortium snapping at their crippled heels. The predicament had been resolved only with a judicious mixture of truth, logic and lie—not to mention a generous measure of luck. The encounter had been in many ways unpleasant and made easier only by the fact that Jayne was too sick to help.

Mal, sick though he was, had declared his intention for revenge the moment that Simon, sick though _he_ was, had announced that their malady was due not to natural contagion but tainted food, but the spark that had really ignited both that declaration and his current ruminations was the sound of Inara, her own eyes dull and face glittered with sweat, sitting at the head of Kaylee’s bed singing softly a mournful old spiritual. This was during the height of the infection, when Mal was staggering back from the cockpit after consulting with Zoe, who suffered a moderate cough but whose temperature never topped 37.5; she was consequently the only one well enough to fly the ship while River, who was not at all affected, was in the galley working her strange alchemy to turn their uncontaminated food stores (mainly protein cubes) into something resembling chicken soup. Caught by her sweet, rough voice, Mal had slid down the wall to sit on the floor, aching and confused and fiercely aware of his own mortality and that of those around him, and murmured along the words he knew. The act of singing had been comforting at the time, but the song’s content (a treatise on the theme of misery and interminable wandering in life soothed by the reassurance of peace and reunion with loved ones in the hereafter) had left him troubled.

A logical extension of the subjectivity of “up” was that it was impossible to go there. One could launch “upwards” from a planet’s surface and travel for an eternity in the same direction and never get any closer. Where then was heaven? For it could not be up, if up was unapproachable. How did one get there, and why were folks conditioned to look away from the floor to find it? Was it just as much a myth as up?

These were the thoughts that occupied Mal’s mind as he trudged along the dirt trail to the private cabin (of which, he had been repeatedly assured, Castaigne would be the sole occupant), still sallow and weak from his infirmity, and no matter how many times or how many ways he asked the questions still the answers would not resolve. All he knew was that he might not be a good man, that Castaigne was definitely not, that up was a lie, and that he would keep looking there for the heaven he wasn’t sure existed and was even less sure he deserved a place in. He would shoot Castaigne at a downward angle to drive his soul farther away from the fallacy of up, and when it was done he would return to Serenity and pretend to be a good man again.


End file.
